Free The Lamp of the Wicked by Phil Rickman Page B

it, then.’ She moved along the verge, the hem of her alb getting soaked in the long grass. ‘If anybody sees us, we can say the van broke down and we’re trying to find a phone.’
    When they rounded the bend, the road began to dip and the house was below them, a block of shadow. It was no more than twenty feet back from the road and looked even closer because of its comparative isolation. Living here, you’d hear the traffic all night, a restless lullaby.
    ‘Entrance is just past the house itself, up a little drive,’ Gomer whispered. ‘All the land’s the other side, see.’
    ‘And that’s where the… thing is?’
    ‘The Hefflapure.’ He stopped and looked back at her, shaking his head as if he was just waking up. ‘Bloody daft, this, ennit?’
    ‘Something you had to do, that’s all,’ Merrily said.
    ‘Naw, just an ole man lookin’ for a… what’s the word?’
    Scapegoat?
‘Can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Look, tonight we… you’ve seen what no relative should ever have to see. Maybe… I dunno… maybe we both needed to drive around a bit.’
    ‘Ar.’ Gomer stood at the edge of the A49, squeezing his fingers together. He seemed to have left his ciggy tin in the van. Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut, offered him one. Gomer shook his head.
    ‘People thought he must be called Neville. Used to get letters addressed to Mr Neville Parry.’ I thought that, too. What
was
he called?’
    ‘Nevin. Seaside place in North Wales, where his folks used to go on their holidays. Likely he was conceived there.’
    Merrily smiled, and they both stepped back onto the grass as a high-sided touring coach swished past towards Ross, probably empty except for the driver. Its passenger windows, only feebly lit, were reflected, fragmented, in the leaded upper windows of the Pawson house.
    But its dipped headlights set up more of a glare in Gomer’s glasses. And in the dusty back windscreen of the big digger in the drive.
    All the breath came out of Gomer in a rush and Merrily actually went cold with shock.
    The digger sat there silently, unoccupied, its shovel half- raised in front.
    ‘It’s him,’ Gomer said drably, after a moment. ‘Lodge. He’s bloody well yere.’

8
Nil Odour
    A FTER A MOMENT, Merrily felt calmer. When she’d first seen the JCB in the drive it had been like the instant when a dream turned malignant, when your subconscious mind presented you, unexpectedly, with an image so loaded with menace, within the logic of the dream, that it jerked you awake for reasons of mental self-preservation. And then you thought, surprised at yourself,
For heaven’s sake, it was just a truck
.
    ‘Gomer,’ she said, ‘let’s just… let’s think about this.’
    But Gomer was already off – the way he’d reacted back at the depot when he’d realized the savage truth behind Cliff Morgan’s gentle probing about Nev’s whereabouts. Only now he had a real, solid target; he was a man with something to prove, something tangible within his grasp. Before she could think to stop him, he was in through the gateway, urgently pushing back shrubs and squeezing around the side of the digger and under its wide front shovel.
    Which was as far as he got, because that was when the nightmare came out of remission.
    Merrily must have seen it first – a movement from the blackness between the drive and the house, and it made her jump, but she didn’t cry out because it could have been a cat or an owl. And then she saw Gomer come skating backwards, bumping along the side of the digger, bushes ripping at his jacket.
    Gomer!’ He crashed back into a timber gatepost. She rushed to him. He was still on his feet but wheezing. ‘Gomer, Christ, are you—’
    And then there was another man’s voice uncoiling from the shadows.
    ‘You want some more? You want some more, matey, you come right back now, look, and touch my digger again.’
    Merrily gripped Gomer’s arm, steadying him. ‘He hit you?’
    ‘Pushed me, was all.